THU DAU MOT UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES PHAN THI HOANG GIA AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE TEACHING AND LEARNING OF READING SKILLS FOR GRADE 10 STUDENTS IN BINH DUONG PROVINCE MAJOR: ENGLISH LANGUAGE MAJOR CODE: 8220201 MASTER THESIS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE BINH DUONG – 2022 THU DAU MOT UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES PHAN THI HOANG GIA AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE TEACHING AND LEARNING OF READING SKILLS FOR GRADE 10 STUDENTS IN BINH DUONG PROVINCE MAJOR: ENGLISH LANGUAGE MAJOR CODE: 8220201 MASTER THESIS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE Supervised by HUYNH THI BICH PHUONG, Ph.D BINH DUONG - 2022 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To begin, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Huynh Thi Bich Phuong, for her insightful comments and for devoting her valuable time to read my thesis with great care. I am very appreciative of the unwavering sympathy and persistent encouragement that she has given me thus far. My special thanks for my lecturers at Thu Dau Mot University for their endless enthusiasm and undeniable helpful lectures.
I would be very grateful to the staff of the Post-graduate Department for their support during the time of studying. I am truly grateful to the Board of school of three high schools, including Bau Bang high school, Ben Cat high school, and Tran Van On high school for their approval of performing the thesis within the schools’ premises. My thesis would not have been completed without the supports of teachers of English and grade-10 students as the research participants; hence, I would like to thank all of them. I owe a great deal to my family, who have always been unflinchingly supportive and understanding, allowing me to devote all of my time to finishing my thesis.
i STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY I certify that the intellectual content of the thesis “An Investigation into the Teaching and Learning of Reading Skills for Grade 10 Students in Binh Duong Province” is the product of my own work, and it does not contain materials written or published by other people or other people’s ideas except the information from the references. This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other institution. Binh Duong, July 2022 Signature Phan Thi Hoang Gia ii RETENTION OF USE I hereby state that I, Phan Thi Hoang Gia, being a candidate for the degree of Master of English Language accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library. In this regard, I agree that the original of my Master’s thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research.
Binh Duong, July 2022 Signature Phan Thi Hoang Gia iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. i STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY. ii RETENTION OF USE.iii TABLE OF CONTENTS.iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.vii LIST OF TABLES. viii LIST OF FIGURES.
Background to the study. Statement of the problem. Aims and objectives of the study. Scope of the study.
Significance of the study. Organization of the study. Definition of key terms. Models of Reading skills.
Relevant factors in students’ learning the reading skills. Poor language use. Teaching strategies for enhancing the reading skills. Classification of reading strategies.
Strategies for enhancing the reading skills according to pedagogical approaches. The effective process of reading comprehension. Sample and sampling procedure. Data collection procedures.
Reliability and validity. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. Difficulties in reading skills. Responses by students from questionnaires.
Responses by students from interviews. Responses by teachers from questionnaires. Responses by teachers from interviews. Suggestions for improving on reading skills.
Responses by students from questionnaires. Responses by students from interviews. Responses by teachers from questionnaires. Responses by teachers from interviews.
Suggestions for further studies. Questionnaire for students Appendix B. Questionnaire for teachers Appendix C. Interview for students Appendix D.
Interview for teachers vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ELT English Language Teaching EFL English as a Foreign Language L1 First language L2 Second language vii LIST OF TABLES Table 3. Demographic characteristics of student respondents. Design of the questionnaire. Students’ perceptions of reading difficulties caused by vocabulary.2 Students’ perceptions of reading difficulties caused by grammar.
Students’ perceptions of reading difficulties caused by text structure. Students’ perceptions of reading difficulties caused by common knowledge. Students’ perceptions of reading difficulties caused by other factors. Teachers’ perceptions of reading difficulties caused by vocabulary.
Teachers’ perceptions of reading difficulties caused by grammar. Teachers’ perceptions of reading difficulties caused by text structure. Teachers’ perceptions of reading difficulties caused by common knowledge. Teachers’ perceptions of reading difficulties caused by other factors.
Descriptive statistics of students’ reading strategies……………………. Descriptive statistics of teachers’ reading strategies. 53 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The reading process with three stages…………………………………….
Conceptual framework of the teaching and learning of reading skills for Grade 10 students in Binh Duong province……………………………….27 ix ABSTRACT Reading skills are of great significance to students’ English language learning. The study attempts to explore the teaching and learning the reading skills for grade-10 students in Binh Duong Province with the focus on two aspects including the difficulties in reading comprehension and strategies to overcome. In order to obtain research objectives, the method was employed by the researcher with the use of the questionnaires and interviews to collect data from the respondents of 420 grade-10 students and 18 teachers of English from three high schools in Binh Duong Province as research participants. Firstly, poor language use and common knowledge were perceived as reading difficulties by grade-10 students.
Among these difficulties, vocabulary and background knowledge were perceived as the most influential ones. In terms of teachers’ perspectives, only vocabulary and background knowledge caused the challenges for their students in reading comprehension. Secondly, guessing word meaning, scanning and skimming, paraphrasing, and questioning were considered frequently used reading strategies applied by the teachers to improve students’ reading comprehension skills. Based on research findings, the implications are generated concerning the recognition of reading strategies and implementation of effective reading strategies to improve students’ reading comprehension skills.
INTRODUCTION The current chapter presents the introduction, which introduces the background to the study, the statement of the problem, the research questions, aims and objectives of the study, the significance of the study, the scope of the study, and the organization of the thesis. Background to the study It is clear that the growing demand for mastering a foreign language, particularly English, is a bi-product of the increasing number of foreign sectors and participants in society. Therefore, the important roles of English cannot be denied or ignored since it is the right language spoken universally. Besides, it is the language of choice in the majority of inter-regional or inter-continental conversations and negotiations in the United States (Rao, 2019).
Despite the fact that English is one of the most difficult languages to teach and learn due to its use in cross-cultural exchanges, it reveals a profound significance in education and training (McKay, 2018). In Binh Duong province, there are actually many schools which have even offered English as an obligatory course to students since the first grade; as a result, most students have spent between 7 and 10 years in school learning English. Students are expected to master four basic language skills including reading, writing, speaking, and listening according to their appropriate levels from primary school to high school. Besides, the topics included in the program are also found both familiar and challenging for students.
Thus, their achievements in English fall short of the expectations of the program despite the fact that they finish learning English for a minimum of three years in a row. Consequently, students are generally weak in a wide range of skills. Regarding the reading skills, it is stated by Snow, Burns and Griffin (1998) that reading is vital for human activities and crucial people’s success in the society. In terms of educational setting, according to Clarke et al.
(2013), sufficient reading comprehension skills are essential for the students to reach their educational goals and expectations. For instance, if the students have good abilities in reading and understanding the texts, they can successfully locate and interpret the information and 1 messages of the texts as well as identify which is the focus information or irrelevant one to the texts. Furthermore, in order to gain academic success, it is crucial that students can read, understand and apply the information acquired from reading in their enhancing other skills (Clarke et al., 2013), and their reading comprehension also becomes much improved in different levels when students have to deal with more complicated texts in higher levels (Clarke et al. Statement of the problem It is undoubted that English is an official language in over 53 countries, and it is also spoken as the first language by nearly 400 million people worldwide.
According to the British Council, about two billion people in the world will be studying English by 2020. In addition, English is considered the international and most popular language in the majority of inter-regional or inter-continental conversations and negotiations. Obviously, together with their mother tongue, understanding and mastering a new language generally and English particularly definitely open a wide range of opportunities for people in terms of approaching novel ideas and inventions in the world as well as job career development, which promises potential salary, promotion, networking, and an innovative working environment. Therefore, bearing the perspective that English language education is a strategy to speed up national development, international communication, and a tool to successfully approach other cultures (Chang 2011), English has become a privileged international language taught in Asia (Kirkpatrick 2012), including Vietnam.
In recent years, English has been considered a compulsory subject among some others for the entry examination into high school and a conditional factor for earning admission into top and middle-ranked universities. Admission also prioritizes students who have earned an English on the innovation scheme on foreign language learning of the Ministry of Education, and the shift in learning and mastering foreign languages right after graduating from high school. In terms of learning English skills, according to Clarke et al. Clemens and Simmons (2018) defined reading skills as the ability to extract and construct meaning of texts through the learners’ involvement and 2 interaction with written texts.
Fletcher-Janzen et al. (2013) also elaborated that such reading skills (the ability to interpret words’ meaning, the ability to understand the author’s points of view, the ability to make inference, etc.) are among the key skills that facilitate the language learners’ reading comprehension. Furthermore, it is also revealed by Hall and Barnes (2017) that reading skills are the key for language learners to achieve their academic goals and expectations within the classroom settings. Conversely, insufficient and poor reading skills which may result in students’ failure to learn and retain the information may negatively influence on their academic achievements and other aspects of life (Katz & Carlisle, 2009; Yukselir, 2014).
As a teacher of English working over 10 ten years in Binh Duong Province, the researcher has realized that grade-10 students have overall low language proficiency and even poor performance of reading skills. Some other teachers of English also express the same opinions on this problem when kindly requested for responses in an interview. This is convincingly supported with the students’ results in English tests, which show low scores for reading sections. This proves the fact these students can hardly meet the objectives of the curriculum.
Actually, this impulses the writer to conduct the study to find out the challenges and appropriate solutions for their improvement, which is titled “An investigation into the teaching and learning of reading skills for Grade 10 students in Binh Duong Province”. Aims and objectives of the study 1. Aims The overarching aims of the study are to investigate the difficulties of reading skills they have faced with. Then, the researcher gives some suggestions for the students to improve their reading comprehension skills, which is in need to meet the current standards of the English curriculum at high school by the Ministry of Education.